Every Startup Should Know This One Simple Rule of Marketing
The golden rule of marketing explained in one easy to understand chart
I can’t tell you how many planning sessions I’ve sat through over the past few years — be it with tiny operations with thousand dollar budgets all the way through to multi-billion-dollar brands — which have been derailed by a version of one of the following comments:
- Yeah, but no-one actually watches TV anymore. I mean, in our household we haven’t watched anything that’s not Netflix in months.
- So, what’s our LinkedIn strategy?
- But what about podcasts? Everyone listens to podcasts now. I’m listening to a great one at the moment…
Now, I’m all for a robust debate on the efficacy of LinkedIn marketing. I‘ll spar back and forth on the educational value of podcasts and the channel’s amazing growth over the past couple of years.
But in the context of actually planning out how to market and advertise your business to consumers, these types of comments are blinding out of touch with reality.
And that reality is plain: entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers, and advertising execs are, for the most part, not like their customers. We are not ‘normal’ people in any meaningful sense of the word when it comes to understanding average consumer behaviour.
Mark Ritson makes this fact brilliantly clear in a single chart from his Mumbrella360 presentation from a couple of years ago.
Drawing on social media usage data, this chart highlights the vast chasm between how ‘ad people’ (in which we’ll include anyone involved in marketing or selling a product) consume media and how the general population does.
While startup founders, marketers, and ‘ad people’ spend their days sharing business articles and ‘liking’ updates on LinkedIn and Twitter, most ‘normal’ people do not. They’re watching Tiger King and nostalgia-binging Friends on Netflix in between bouts of flicking through Facebook and watching movie trailers on YouTube.
Of course, the data in this chart is now a couple of years old. Yet, again and again, research has shown that people who work in marketing and advertising products share vastly different behaviours, thoughts, and feelings to the general population. As Ritson explains further in Marketing Week:
“The first rule of marketing is that you are not the market. All your thoughts, feelings and immediate responses to things like advertising, price and packaging are not just incorrect — they are dangerous.”
With this in mind, it is hardly surprising to see business repeatedly failing to connect with their audience in an authentic manner. Can we ever forget Pepsi’s disastrous 2017 ‘Live for Now’ commercial featuring Kendall Jenner, which culminated with the New York Times headline, ‘Pepsi Pulls Ad Accused of Trivializing Black Lives Matter.’
However, there are ways we can reduce this gap between those of us in marketing and the end consumer.
Learn, learn, and then learn some more.
Understanding the importance of distancing yourself from the market, is one of the foundations of good marketing training. Yet as Simon Derungs of Econsultancy notes:
“We find that very few marketers know how to explore, identify and turn insights about their consumers into compelling marketing activities.”
While a lack of formal training in marketing techniques is not seen as a limitation in many circles, Derungs remains adamant that “training…is arguably the single important investment you can make in improving your marketing performance.”
Now, this doesn’t mean going back to university and studying for a degree in marketing — although if you really want to, I strongly encourage you to do so!
There are plenty of other options out there. Coursera offers a number of free courses on marketing, such as Duke University’s ‘Advertising and Society’, and the IE Business School’s introduction to positioning and marketing strategy. Google’s Digital Garage, offers great insights into how to use the company’s marketing suite to gain audience and customer insights. Even just reading the opinions of successful marketers and advertisers like Bob Hoffman (the Ad Contrarian), Neil Patel, or any of Marketing Week’s regular columnists, will go a long way towards improving your skills and knowledge-base.
Whatever your thoughts on the value of formal training, one thing is definitely true — a desire to learn, and to improve your skills in developing real consumer insights, isn’t going to hurt anyone.
Check your biases at the door
I am reminded of a quote by an old, ex-marketer at the Mars company who once said, “the only people who wake up every day thinking about chocolate bars are the people who make chocolate bars.”
Our default setting is to view our personal experiences as reflective of that of others’ and to hold onto our own ideas and beliefs more tightly than we occasionally should.
And this afflicts all of us. Even one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century, Steve Jobs, has been described as having, at times, a dangerously distorted perception of the world and an “eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.”
But we can draw on other disciplines which are slowly implementing techniques to help reduce subconscious biases in decision-making. In The Intelligence Trap, David Robson notes a growing momentum in medicine to employ mindfulness, reflective thinking, and ‘cognitive inoculation’ to identify and minimize biases. While the American Judges Association has also recently published a white paper explaining how Judges can use mindfulness and introspective techniques to improve decision-making and reduce flawed emotional reasoning.
Final Thoughts
We all want to view ourselves as ‘regular folk’, in tune with the lives and experiences of the general population. But, often, that is simply not the case. Those of us who are entrepreneurs, marketers, and advertising execs are almost certainly not ‘normal’ when it comes to understanding general consumer behaviour.
But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Through ongoing training, a desire to learn, and a mindful approach to our biases, we can learn to distance our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviours from the actual insights from consumers which should be informing our marketing and advertising practices.
